THREE

The Myths Grad Students Believe

U nfortunately, Ph.D. students are largely resistant to professionalization. It seems that many don’t want to learn the truth of a collapsing academic job market any more than many faculty want to admit it. Far too many keep their heads firmly in the sand, preferring to fixate on the minutiae of immediate graduate school requirements—the classes, papers, comprehensive exams, and dissertation. They rest all their hopes in the completed dissertation as a magical talisman of scholarly success, unaware that it is scarcely more than a union card—the bare minimum proof of eligibility to apply for the rapidly disappearing jobs that allow for continued scholarly work.

Certainly they are encouraged in this by faculty advisors, who, when confronted with anxious reports from the job hunt, offer the easy evasion “just focus on your dissertation,” as far preferable (for both advisors and advisees) to a hard conversation about an academy in crisis, on the one hand, or flaws in a student’s record, on the other.

But on a grander scale, graduate students (particularly in the humanities) are some of the most earnest and uncritical devotees of the Work of the Mind myth. Indeed, they enter graduate school in the belief that somehow the realm of the academic will be a grand departure from the competitive rat race that prevails in the corporate sector. “How wonderful!” they can often be heard saying: “I can get paid (a paltry teaching assistant stipend, but paid nonetheless) to think (about continental philosophy/medieval Buddhism/ethnic nationalism/transgender identity/et cetera)!”

Many graduate students resent the message that the point of graduate school might be to prepare for an actual career, because it is the realm of the career and its grasping, self-interested imperatives from which they are so often fleeing.

Consequently, graduate students cling mightily to a number of hoary myths about the academic job market. Here is a partial list:

All culminating in a renewed doctrinal affirmation of the Work of the Mind: “The point of graduate school is not to prepare for a job, but to think great thoughts and contribute to human knowledge!”

As one grad student wrote in a review of a workshop I gave at one of the University of California campuses, “Dr. Kelsky’s advice of thinking about graduate school as a means to a job was both helpful and disheartening….While I do agree that thinking long term about how each thing you do in graduate school will shape your future, I also think that graduate school is much more than a means to a job. Graduate school is a place to explore, discover, and learn with others. It’s a place to talk and debate with intellectuals, innovate, and challenge the limits of knowledge in your field.” ¹ She concluded, “The connections that you make in graduate school through getting involved, mentoring undergraduates, and teaching are invaluable. Although these may not show up as a line on your CV, they will shape who you are and help you during your job interview.”

This reviewer is wrong, of course, that “getting involved, mentoring…and teaching” are going to “help you during your job interview.” They are nice things, to be sure, indeed valuable things, and should be supported as general good practice. But make no mistake: They are not things that get a candidate short-listed.

It is understandable that graduate students would want to believe that dedication and passion get jobs. Passion is an important component of the graduate school enterprise—without it, how could someone finish a grueling years-long Ph.D. program? And in a different era—the high-growth 1950s and ’60s, for example—passion and dedication may have been the key to success. However, in an era of Olympics-level competition for today’s almost nonexistent tenure track slots, passion counts for the tenure track job market just as much as a passion for running gets a person to the Olympic gold medal podium. In short, it counts only as the motivator for a set of specific skills leading to a narrow set of quantifiable and mostly objective outcomes, in this case publications, grants, targeted teaching experience, and impressive references.

And while you may not be particularly concerned about the objective career imperative at twenty-five, when you are just starting out on your graduate school journey, by thirty-four, fatigued from years of deprivation and often with new household obligations, health expenses, or dependents, passion doesn’t pay the bills. And neither, unfortunately, does teaching, if it’s happening in the adjunct classroom.

One common tactic graduate students turn to in an effort to appear “realistic” while allowing denial to remain intact is a preemptive rhetorical reduction of career aspirations. This arises in statements such as:

As if a lowered career bar renders the job seeker immune to market forces. This rhetorical move is usually combined with the previously mentioned overinvestment in the value of teaching. Former adjunct Nathaniel C. Oliver described this rationalization as it once influenced his early adjuncting days:

I’ve always been frugal in my spending habits, so the low pay did not bother me much at first, assuming as I did that after a few years of apprenticing, I would be moved up to full-time, as long as my work continued to be acceptable to my superiors. At times, it was difficult to accept that I was teaching a full course load while making poverty-level wages, but again, I assumed that my diligence would be rewarded, not with riches, but simply with a comfortably middle-class job. Like all academics, I have always had big dreams for myself, but I felt that time had made my aspirations more modest and therefore, more attainable. ²

There aren’t many other words to describe this graduate student stance toward the academic job market than denial. Denial, and a willingly dependent and juvenile subject position. The graduate student in the rhet/comp event described in chapter 2 , after all, turned to her professors for “hope.” And the blogger Ann Larson wrote that she anxiously awaited words of “comfort.” But why should tenured professors be repositories of hope or comfort? In fact, Brereton’s message—stick with your program and you’ll get a job—is precisely a message of hope and comfort. The students know that it is profoundly wrong (“the audience murmured in disagreement”) but can’t bring themselves to stop seeking the reassurance. It should be clear by now that asking professors for hope and comfort is seeking a false reassurance that professors can still, somehow, make everything turn out all right. It’s asking for a bedtime story. It exposes a stance of childlike dependency, not a position of self-reliance.

In a Chronicle of Higher Education piece, William Pannapacker described the reactions of would-be graduate students to his writing on reasons to avoid graduate school in the humanities:

The follow-up letters I receive…are often quite angry and incoherent; [the writers have] been praised their whole lives, and no one has ever told them that they may not become what they want to be, that higher education is a business that does not necessarily have their best interests at heart. Sometimes they accuse me of being threatened by their obvious talent. I assume they go on to find someone who will tell them what they want to hear: “Yes, my child, you are the one we’ve been waiting for all our lives.” ³

He, too, urged a prompt rejection of this childlike subject position: “It can be painful, but it is better that [those] considering graduate school in the humanities should know the truth now, instead of when they are 30 and unemployed, or worse, working as adjuncts at less than the minimum wage under the misguided belief that more teaching experience and more glowing recommendations will somehow open the door to a real position.”

There is no “safe haven” for Ph.D.’s on the academic job market. Telling and hearing the truth requires quite the opposite of puerile messages of hope. To avoid the Ph.D.-adjunct-debt spiral, you must first face the truth of the collapsing academic economy yourself. You must choose, consciously, an approach that minimizes risk and maximizes return on your investment of time and money in the Ph.D. enterprise. And you must declare independence from any advisor who peddles false hope.

To do this, you must use every year in graduate school to produce a record oriented precisely to the demands of the tenure track market, while keeping an eye open to nonacademic options. This effort should start not in your final year in the program, but much earlier; it is possible to begin preparing for the academic and nonacademic job market even before you enter graduate school, and to deliberately adapt your strategy as you move through the program. In this way you take an autonomous, adult stance toward your own professional future, rather than putting it in the hands of in loco parentis advisors.

Never forget: Your advisor keeps drawing his paycheck whether you get hired or not. Your advisor pays his mortgage whether you can pay rent or not. Unhappy that your advisor doesn’t have your back? Have your own back. Protect yourself. V+Yz16GLapQsMGSBwQzoNN3SJevflqxHFMvEg7fS26Bx9AhbjpLL9Gd8jtF1q7hv